Katrina Daly Thompson

Professor; Department Chair; Director of the Program in African Languages

Bio

Katrina Daly Thompson (she/they) is Professor and Chair of African Cultural Studies, the Director of the Program in African Languages, and a core faculty member in Second Language Acquisition, with additional affiliations in Anthropology, Gender & Women’s Studies, Religious Studies, Folklore, and the Middle Eastern Studies Program. Her research uses critical ethnography and critical discourse analysis to examine African and Muslim discourse, with specific projects in Zimbabwe, Tanzania, North America, and online.

Thompson’s current research focus is a multi-sited ethnography of nonconformist/progressive Muslim communities of practice in North America and online, contributing to queer anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and Islamic Studies.

First Prize in the 2016 Ethnographic Fiction and Creative Nonfiction Writing Competition, sponsored by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, for the ethnographic fiction piece, “Secrets of a Swahili Marriage.”

Advising

Dr. Thompson works with students interested in conducting research in the areas of critical applied linguistics, gender and sexuality, cultural approaches to discourse, discourse-centered approaches to culture, and various uses of ethnography, especially linguistic ethnography, literary ethnography, and autoethnography. She has supervised recent theses and dissertations addressing the following topics:

Representations and enactment of Senegalese women’s sexuality

Naming and embodied memories of violence in Kenya

Discourses of discrimination among Iranian migrants in Germany

Narrative and discursive practices in the Rwandan diaspora surrounding the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi

Use of non-Standard Yoruba in Yoruba-language classrooms in Nigeria

Stereotypes in Kenyan stand-up comedy

Language ideologies and multilingual practices in a Yoruba study abroad program

Codeswitching in Indonesian popular texts

Language socialization and discourses of sexuality, desire, and prevention in reproductive health instruction in Tanzania

Language brokering among Arab immigrants in medical settings

Utopian Swahili fiction

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